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79 -On James Luther Adams |
On James Luther Adams
JLA, as Adams, for many years professor of social ethics at Harvard Divinity School, monograms his torrent of memos and letters, is not represented by volumes of systematic theology or even treatises. No cerulean perspectives awe us, only the literate report of his pilgrimage through a century of industrial conflict, holocaust, and civil protest. The essay form speaks his own theology timely, intentional address to specific audiences in particular times and places. It is the work of the preacher, pastor, and evangelist-perhaps the only resemblance he would admit with St. Paul. Theology emerges, for Adams, not as mental architecture, but as a way of addressing action. The present interest in practical theology finds an exemplar in Adams' own living curriculum.
The religious world is indebted to George Beach and Ronald Engel for assembling these two volumes of essays by James Luther Adams. Here we find fifty years of Adams' diverse writings reflecting his insatiable curiosity, prophetic inquiry, and personal commitments, the immense scope and many-faceted character of which defy theoretical encapsulation. These collections contain sermons, occasional pieces, academic articles, and excerpts from longer works. George Beach provides us with a lengthy and sensitive introduction to the prophetic backbone of Adams' faith as well as to some of the vistas it offers on such diverse topics as aging, ecology, and dreams. Ronald Engel has included a brief bibliography to guide readers to Adams' writings and critical treatments of his thought in a volume filling in the many dimensions of Adams' theory of association. Not only do we have central pieces on voluntary association as a practice of social and ecclesial organization, but perspectives on professions, social structure, and the discipline of social responsibility.
I
A foundational conviction expresses itself early on, in "Taking Time Seriously" (1939, Beach), and reverberates in "Our Responsibility in Society" (1953, Beach) and "Theological Bases of Social Action" (1966, Engel). It is a prophetic conception of faith as a protest against demonic concentrations of power. To put it positively, it is a remonstrance against the human tendency to deny the invitation to participate
William Johnson Everett, a former student and teaching fellow of James Luther Adams at Harvard, is now Associate Professor of Ecclesiology and Director of Advanced Studies at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He recently published God's Federal Republic: Reconstructing Our Governing Symbol (1988). This essay is occasioned by a reading of two recent collections of Adams' essays: George K. Beach, ed., The Prophethood of All Believers (Beacon Press, 1986) and J. Ronald Engel, ed., Voluntary Associations (Exploration Press, 1986).
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in God's unique power. The search for power and the protest against its idolatry find root in the soil of human association. In an era of isolated individualism, Adams has tirelessly advanced relationship and association as the essence of the human, and thus of salvation. Here we find the root of his disdain for liberal individualism and his contempt for pietism. Not to have heard one of his attacks on Bultmann is not to have engaged this professor of public life.
There is a certain recasting of the pietist heritage, however, in Adams' own emphasis on conversion. Conversion here means a reconstruction of life under the impact of God's inbreaking new government. It is essentially political, a diamond forged under the pressure of historic events. We discover in these essays abundant references to key points of conversion in his life, especially his encounter with Nazism and the resistance movement in the German churches.
Beach's Introduction, as well I as Adams' "The Evolution of My Social Concern" (1977, Engel), vividly reconstruct the profound impact of Adams' experiences in Nazi Germany on his whole life and thought. They are crucial for understanding his later grasp of the civil rights movement and civil disobedience in the Vietnam era as well as his labors to advance the vitality of voluntary associations concerned with public policy. The Nazi horror concretized his life-long embrace of what Paul Tillich called the Protestant principle: the conviction that faith always demands distance from established order, for these orders always tend to become demonic. It was Adams who translated an early volume of Tillich's essays that appeared as The Protestant Era. It was Adams who did much to re-establish Tillich in this country after he fled the Nazis.
Adams' long engagement with German theology and church history arose in the power of these experiences, rather than in a theoretical embrace of German intellectual methods. Adams has always had an Anglo-American mind-pragmatic, empirical, and pluralistic. Life is essai and tract rather than system, particular witness rather than cosmic mastery. His engagement with Troeltsch, Weber, Bultmann, Brunner, and many others has been a controversy among pilgrims more than a marriage of minds.
The Nazi experience convicted Adams of the power of sin and the necessity of conflict, a sensitivity rooted in him already by the premillennialist preaching of his father. The conflicts of groups are rooted not only in divergences of material interests, but in opposed visions of just order. This thoroughgoing sense of conflict has led Adams not only to a life-long interest in Marxism, but also to a critique of its truncated conception of history and human motivation. Every adequate theological perspective must contain not only some theory of history but also a vivid conception of human sin and divine grace.
II
In his theory of association, we find the confluence of many of Adams' key principles. First, faith takes form as vocation, the struggle to reconstruct our natural lives in families, ethnic groups, and nations so
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that they conform to the purposes of a universal and transcendent God. It Is a task that is always corporate as well as individual. Second, life is covenantal. God's grace appears in covenantal forms as people continually renew and reconstruct their deepest relationships with each other, with strangers, and with a sovereign God of history. Third, salvation requires the transformation of institutions, without which personal change is meaningless. The process of personal and social conversion is a thoroughly historical engagement requiring particular social and cultural analysis as well as timely strategies.
The sense of vocation, which for Adams is characteristically corporate, has informed a long series of articles, not to mention his long-offered course on vocation. It has shaped his understanding of professions (1958, Engel), of Protestantism ("The Protestant Ethic with Fewer Tears" [1971, Beach]), and, of course, the mission of voluntary associations in changing social structures.
In the latter article, he took particular pains to articulate his thesis that Calvinistic culture did not merely legitimate individual entrepreneurs, but, more importantly, cultivated public-spirited associations seeking to advance the common good. The sense of vocation was first of all public and corporate rather than private and individual. The same perspective has informed his effort to shape the professions around a sense of public responsibility.
The covenantal theme begins in Adams' constant nurture of intentional communities and fellowships ("Notes on Gould Farm" [1955, Engel]) and winds through "From Cage to Covenant" (1975, Beach) and "God and Economics" (1978, Engel). Adams draws on a heritage shaped in what his former student and long-time friend, George Hunston Williams, called the Radical Reformation. Here we find Adams' ecclesial commitments to a process in which people covenant together in light of their covenant with God.
Covenant-making demands commitment to patient articulation, negotiation, and renewal of promises over time. As a covenantalist, Adams found peculiar affinities with the relational philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead ("The Lure of Persuasion: Some Themes from Whitehead" [1976, Beach]). The process of social reconstruction is not ushered in by transcendent might, but by the patient processes of persuasion and association. In the midst of his prophetic exhortation, this, finally, is the style of Adams himself-the pregnant metaphor, the lure of myriad associations and perspectives, the bibliographical bath, the vision of exciting possibilities, capped off with the hearty winning laugh.
Adams' powers of persuasion have lain not in the logic of a mathematics that traps our minds, but in the power of images that restructure our loyalties. It may be the music of Bach's B Minor Mass or the rendering of Christ's crucifixion by Grunewald. It may be images in our unconscious, known only in dreams. All of these are important, finally, because they structure our associations with others and with God. In his own life, Adams has not been the brilliant logician or rhetorician.
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Rather, he has patiently constructed a vast network of associations with students, colleagues, ministers, and community leaders in many countries. His files of correspondence are legendary in their scope. The melody of his life is played out on these strings kept taut with his incisive criticism and singing with his extraordinary personal support.
One of JLA's best-known aphorisms is: "By their groups shall ye know them." By his groups, he has not only known others; they have known him. Through them, he has exercised a pastoral as well as prophetic care for others, a public love more important than a shelf of publications. This has been the flowering of covenantal association in his own life. It has been the primary channel of his own influence and rootage in history.
III
Adams' ongoing commitment to social change is reflected in his hearty advice that one should not serve on a library committee unless the librarian is accused of being a Communist (Beach, p. 15). This sense of resistance to established idolatries and respectable injustices leads out to a full-fledged sense of social responsibility as an ongoing discipline-a discipline to form groups, hammer out positions, engage opponents, recruit allies, and stay 'tit the end of meetings, not to mention pay the light bill. (See "The Indispensable Discipline of Social Responsibility," [1966, Engel]; and "The Geography and Organization of Social Responsibility" [1974, Engel].)
Participation in history occurs through association and group incorporation. While Baron von Hügel helped anchor this conviction in his mind, it was one his marrow received through his congregational ancestry. History is knit together not by the Zeitgeist or by heroes, but by the web of associations that can remember the past, organize power, create public spaces, and share power with newcomers. In order to advance this work of memory, mobilization, and anticipation, groups must always construct an image or theory of history.
Adams' continual interest in this work of historiography arose not merely from his father's millennial beliefs, but because he witnessed the power of historic myth in the Nazis' consolidation of power and in the vitality of Marxist revolutionary movements. A powerful theory of history almost always places us at the end time, what Tillich called the "kairos," where the old order is passing away and a new order is still moist clay in our hands. Here we find another root of his sense of social responsibility, of vocation, and timeliness.
Ecclesiology is the bridge, for Adams, between faith and ethics. Ecclesia is a historic and voluntary association that emerges in the acute awareness of the gap between the old order and the new. The assembly that grows up in the awareness of this prophetic gap can carry out its vocation well or badly. Even the voluntary church can be distorted. But its distortion can be rectified, not by a return to some divine authoritarianism, but by a renewed association within the church ("The Voluntary Principle in the Forming of American Religion [1971,
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Engel]). It is to this constant renewal of the ecclesia through the nurture of ecclesiolae that Adams has devoted much of his life.
IV
Clearly, the sphere of public action is the keystone of Adams' architecture. On the one side, we can see the whole realm of culture and, on the other, the material and involuntary elements in life-work, family, geography, and historical circumstance. Rather than neglect them, he has attended to them in a variety of ways, some of which are revealed in these two volumes.
His concern for culture was galvanized first of all by his Harvard mentor Irving Babbitt, who introduced him to the world of literary and cultural criticism. Perhaps second in importance was the way Tillich opened up the deep cultural dimensions of faithful and prophetic action. In his class lectures on vocation, Adams never failed to point out the importance of personal ideals such as the gentleman, the lady, the saint, and the pilgrim for shaping historic action. The arts were never far away as seismographs of historical consciousness and even as the dynamite to break up history's logjams.
Cultural analysis always could feed into the personality sciences as well. He has had a long interest in Freud, in the humanistic psychology of his old friend Erich Fromm, and in the various therapies of rehabilitation implicit in the work at Gould Farm and other groups he has supported, such as the Southeastern Institute. These have been pastoral as well as intellectual concerns. Yet, we do not have the elaboration of a psychology in his writings. Perhaps this is because Adams has always excoriated the tendency to "manicure the soul" at the expense of public reconstruction. Short of that, however, he has always reminded us of the importance of personal transformation in any effort at social change.
On the other side of the keystone from cultural and psychological concerns lies the involuntary order. Here again we find a clear awareness of the importance of family order ("Thou Shalt not Commit Adultery," [1966, Beach]), of labor and work, and of the enormous governmental orders of our time ("Mediating Structures and the Separation of Powers" [1980, Engel]). All of these, however, are remembered mostly for the way they restrict public energies (the family), enervate citizens (work), or tend toward total idolatrous control (the state). They are analyzed with prophetic suspicion rather than approbative celebration. The keystone of covenantal association holds by resisting the stones it needs to play its role.
The tension and resistance that Adams always maintains between these vectors of voluntarism and involuntarism prevent the growth of some holistic theory that would embrace them both neatly. One would have to turn to one of his foremost students, Max Stackhouse, for that kind of effort. Adams himself has kept his hand to the plow selected early on. It has taken many furrows over many hills and hollows, but the field has been fertile, the fruits nourishing, and the seasons gracious to the task.